


Dinner at Hawke's

by BlondePomeranian



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Family, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-30
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-03-11 14:16:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13526031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlondePomeranian/pseuds/BlondePomeranian
Summary: An on-going, sometimes a-chronological series about exactly what it sounds like.





	Dinner at Hawke's

**Author's Note:**

> Using a blue/purple mage f!Hawke in a world where the Hightown mansion actually possesses a kitchen.

Although the Deep Roads expedition was not without its own price, the payoff ended exceeding the cost and then some. And then a lot more.  
Hawke spared no time in getting her family out of Lowtown and into somewhere better like her family—what was left of it—deserved. She found a nice mansion with a central location in Hightown and spared no expense making sure it lived up to her mother’s memory of what House Amell used to be.

  
But still something ached.

  
Carver’s decision to join the Templars stung stronger than anything she’d faced in the Deep Roads. It kept her up at night wondering how a boy steeped in magic from his father and sisters—sharing the same water of the womb with Bethany, even—could lead him to become the one thing they all feared. That maybe it had nothing to do with family and everything to do with how he’d felt like the bird with the broken wing who could never leave the nest, kept her up in the early morning long after night had passed.

  
Once everything had settled with moving from Lowtown to Hightown, Hawke made a list of things she would need to pull this off and pull them back together, at least for one evening. At the top of the list: her brother.

  
It started as many childish ploys began: with a fib.

  
“Oh, Andraste’s arse,” she cursed loud enough for her mother to hear in the other room. “Don’t tell me I forgot it!”

  
Her mother took the bait and swallowed it in a single gulp, storming around the corner. “Young lady! I don’t care that you bought this house, but I do not care to have you saying such things!”

  
Hawke hid a smile and looked up from the sea of paperwork at her desk. “Sorry, mother. There’s just a very important document I need to finalize everything, and I think I might have left it at Uncle Gamlen’s.”

  
Leandra scoffed. “Send a courier.”

  
“That’s just the thing,” Hawke said slowly, trying to find just the thing, as it were. “Turns out our coin’s a bit under lock so long as I don’t have that paper. And even if I did have the coin to send for a courier, I don’t know that I would trust them.”

  
Leandra crossed her arms with a frown. “Nor Uncle Gamlen.”

  
“Unfortunately. And I am… just mired in paperwork here.” Hawke said, trying to hide a coy smile. “I could go fetch it, if you could just double check that I properly itemized all the right tax—”

  
With a wave of her hand, Leandra purposefully strode away from the paperwork. “No need, no need. I’ll go fetch it for you, and make sure Gamlen hasn’t drank himself stupid now that’s he’s all by himself again…”

  
“You’re such a good sister.”

  
“Don’t remind me.”

  
Hawke waited until she heard the echo of the front door shut before she jumped from her chair, and grabbed her list. That rush of childish rebelliousness in watching her mother fall for one of her silly fibs propelled her towards the opposite window, out it, and skidding down the bricks until she hit the ground running, wearing a grin as big as if she’d just stolen a cookie from the cookie jar.

...

She wished she’d had more time to relish in the looks on the Templars trainee’s faces when a known apostate burst in on their training and commanded them to bring her brother to see her. But she was in a race against the clock, and Carver would milk all the time she had with all the convincing he’d need.

  
Carver greeted her with the intensity of a summer heatwave. “I can’t believe you. Do you know how much trouble you’re causing for me?” He shook his head. “No, of course you don’t. You only think of yourself—”

  
“Remember how I told you I got us a mansion in Hightown?”

  
“Yes, I remember reading your change of address letter as I found a third hole in my bedsheet in the barracks.”

  
“We’re finally moved in, all settled. It’s starting to feel like a home… but it’s not yet. It’s Sunday.”

  
Carver blinked, then had the decency to look away from her as he swore.

  
She leaned in. “I need your help.”

  
He held a hand up, taking a step back from her. “No, just… no. That… died back in Lothering, along with… No.”

  
But Hawke was persistent. She knew if she pressed enough of his buttons, something was bound to happen. “Think of mother! How happy she’ll be to see her boy back, even for just one evening, and to see him just as father once—”

  
For the first time, he pressed back. “I can’t. You and Bethany and father could cook because you’re mages—”

  
“And terrible with the prep work and remembering to follow the recipe. Mother will be so happy and…” she hesitated. Depending on Carver’s feelings to fall in line was a risk that hardly ever paid off. “I know it won’t be the same, but it will help, Carver.”

  
He stood there, arms crossed and eyes just as steeled and closed off. She had to admit, adorned in the heavy metal armor of the Templars, the little boy of the family looked… not so little any more.  
But that didn’t make him any less her little brother. The steel sloughed off from stare and Carver dropped his arms to his side. “Fine. I’ll see if I can pull some strings.”

...

Pulling Carver from training that evening had been no easy task, especially with Cullen at the helm of the decision. She hadn’t heard and Carver wouldn’t tell what this would cost him tomorrow, but he simply repeated the same words he’d used when he’d left them for the Templars: “I know the value of family.”

  
They’d swung by the markets on their race home to pick up what they needed from the list. Carver had scrunched his nose at one point. “Cabbages?”

  
“Mother loves them,” Hawke reasoned.

  
“So do you… but I don’t.”

  
“Sure, but if you took the time to read the list, you’d see I put on there that stinky cheese that you like that makes the whole house smell like a giant fart.”

  
“It does not. It’s you, mother, and the cabbages that make it smell like that.”

  
She smirked. Not only because he wasn’t wrong, but because everything was starting to feel more right already.

...

The kitchen was much more extravagant than what they were used to. Hawke had to admit she was a bit disappointed that she didn’t need as much magic to cook as she did in Lowtown or Lothering, where dinner had been prepared in less of a kitchen and more of a cooking corner.

  
Hawke set the bags of ingredients down on the counter and immediately began coordinating their plan: “Unless mother’s gotten tied up reprimanding Uncle Gamlen, we’ve only got another half an hour to put this all together, so I’ll start lighting the fire and—”

  
“No,” Carver said strongly. “You light the fire now and we’ll be sweating our arses off before we’re even ready to cook. Help me prep everything first so that way when it’s time for you to do the magic thing, everything’ll be ready.”

  
She stopped and felt her eyebrows jump. She’d not been ordered around like that since…

  
Carver looked at her out of the corner of his eye as he sorted the food. “What? Don’t just stand there all daft looking.”

  
She felt another smile tug at her lips. Maybe the Templars wasn’t so bad for him after all.

...

Much to their credit, the remaining Hawke children only argued three times and only botched one part of the recipe before Leandra arrived like a storm wind almost an hour later.

  
“I searched everywhere I could and interrogated your uncle, but those papers were nowhere to be found!” Leandra called to her from the entryway. “You’d better have a good explanation for this, Marian!”

  
“Not to worry, mother.” Hawke responded from the kitchen. “I lied!”

  
“You—”

  
“Come towards the kitchen, mother. You’ll see.”

  
They heard Leandra’s footsteps approaching. “What is that _smell_?”

  
Laying the last of the silverware on the table, Hawke said, “That depends. Is it a good smell or is it a bad smell? Carver got hungry and opened the cheese early, so…”

  
Leandra startled as she came around the corner to the sight before her: a simply set table, a kitchen bustling and steaming, and best of all, her children.

  
All of Leandra’s suspicion melted as she rushed towards them with open arms. “Oh, my little boy!” She embraced Carver and reached on her tip-toes so she could plant a kiss on both cheeks. “Thank the Maker you’re safe and well. How ever did you…?”

  
Hawke, flushed from working the fires in the kitchen, felt another warmth fill her. “It’s Sunday. They may have sticks up their arses and sacks of briars for hearts, but even the Templars recognize the importance of Sunday dinners.”

  
Carver glared at her over his mother’s shoulder, but in the spirit of the moment, kept his mouth shut.

  
A quiet moment passed between them—Hawke wiping the flour from her hands with a contented smile, Leandra near glowing with her family reunited, and Carver trying to pretend he wasn’t still his mother’s child, despite it all.

  
Peeking back at the pot in the kitchen, Hawke cleared her throat, then said, “I… know it won’t be the same, but I’d hoped—"

  
Leandra dropped her hands from Carver’s shoulders to shoot her a look. “Of course it won’t the same. To think it could even measure up would be _insulting_.” She paused, then, seeing her daughter avert her eyes downcast, Leandra added, “It will be different, the first of its kind. A new tradition, grown in the same soil as the old.”

  
Hawke met her mother’s eyes again, a soft light restored.

  
“Well, mother, you must be hungry after the wild goose chase Marian sent you on,” Carver said, gesturing to her seat at the table. “Can I bring you a sampling from the charcuterie platter I put together?”

Leandra followed his lead, asking, “Does it have that blighted Orlesian mold on it?”

  
“Yes, mother,” Carver answered. “But I remembered and kept it locked up under a glass lid this time, so it doesn’t influence the other meats and cheeses to start adorning masks and turning their noses into sundials.”

  
“Oh, what a dear you are. That’s why you’re my favorite son.”

  
“I’m… your only son. But thank you… I think.”

  
Hawke took her cue to return to the kitchen and put the finishing touches on the bread and stew.

...

After the bread had been carved down to crumbs and they’d discussed several times over how the stew, while nostalgically Fereldan, could benefit from the Free Marches’ availability of anise-seed and parsley, the bland smell of reality began to replace the fragrance from the kitchen. The silence between them sat heavily on them like bloat.

  
Hawke wiped at her face with her napkin—a manner she saved only for her mother’s presence—before she addressed the inevitable. “I doubt the Templars will let you off as easily next Sunday, Carver, or any Sundays following, really….”

  
Folding his own napkin on the table, he looked rather grim. “Not that they let me off easily this time.” He then steeled himself, seeing his mother’s concern. “Nothing I can’t handle, mother.”

Hawke said, “But a nice dinner for two is just a date. And mother, truly, you can do better.”

  
Carver opened his mouth to say what logically came next—then, it looked like this tradition, too, would die in its infancy. But he couldn’t bring himself to say it; there had been too much death already in this family. Even the suggestion of letting this Hawke family tradition starve and pass quietly into the Fade left him with an uneasy feeling. Slowly, another thought grew in its place. “What about… what about your friends, Marian? Like Merrill, and Aveline. Do they know you can cook?”

  
Hawke looked piqued at the thought. “Only skulls and flesh and baddies, not actual food.”

  
Leandra cleared her throat. “Marian, truly, we are still at the dinner table.”

  
“Sorry, mother.”

  
Carver stood up and began clearing their plates, voice genial, but never making eye contact. “You could invite them instead.”

  
Leandra place her hand on his arm as he grabbed her plate. “Carver, it wouldn’t be the same without you.”

  
For a brief moment, his face softened. “I know, mother. But it wouldn’t be the same… just different. Nothing wrong with that, is there?”

  
Chagrined at having her own words twisted against her, Leandra gave him a small and tight-lipped smile. “No, I suppose not.” She followed it up with a firm pat on the arm to send him away. As he walked away and the thought took root in her, her smile began to unfurl into something more genuine. “In fact, that could be… rather nice.”

  
Hawke leaned back in her chair. “Oh, this could be fun. Next thing you know, we could even turn it into a Sunday bed and breakfast, too. Mother, you can make the breakfast and I’ll provide the—”

  
“ _Marian_!”

  
“Oh please, I’m not being unreasonable! If you find a nice silver fox then I’ll gladly provide the breakfast instead.”

  
From the kitchen, they heard a loud clatter of plates being dropped on the counter. Carver swung around the corner of the entryway, face flushed. He pointed at Hawke. “No.” Then, he pointed at Leandra, who didn’t look unamenable to the idea. “ _No_.”

  
“Aww, Carver, I’m going to miss you so much,” Hawke said, and despite the smugness in her voice and the shit-eating grin on her face, she meant every word.

  
Returning to the kitchen, Carver replied, “I was going to, but now I think I’ll be just fine.”

...

Hawke woke up the next morning feeling better than she’d felt in a very long time. She got out of bed, grabbed a piece of leftover bread from last night, and sat down at her desk, clearing it of all the clutter. She grabbed a few square pieces of parchment paper, a quill, and an ink fountain.

  
With a budding smile, she began to carefully pen the words, _You are Hereby Invited…_


End file.
